


My Bones do not taste of Crown and Silver

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [10]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Cannibalism (Mentioned), F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 02:40:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5850943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angharad grows up among the Wretched, with dust in her hair and blood on her feet. She grows up in the shadow of the Citadel, but she doesn't know what it means to be swallowed by it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

A solemn, sullen child, Angharad smoldered with directionless rage that lashed out at everyone around her. Her mother kept her hair chopped unevenly, rubbed sand through it to hide its gold. Her mother pasted rocks to her arms and legs, to make her look half-life. Her mother loved her more than Aqua-Cola. 

“Angharad. Don’t let anyone ever see you.”

“Lots of people see me.” Angharad picked at the scab of a cut she’d gotten in a scrap with another of the Wretched children. He’d been too big for her to fight, really, but Angharad was always ready for a scrap. Her daemon took the shape of a great dane, tongue lolling insolently in the unbearable heat.

“You know what I mean.” Her mother took her proud chin in her one hand, pulling Angharad’s face up towards hers. “Don’t let anyone _see you_. _Merch_ , I try to keep you hidden but you have to start doing these things for yourself.” 

“You do a good enough job, Mama.” Angharad tugged away, her hand moving to rub at the itchy dirt her mother smeared across her arms and legs. “Why should I worry about it?”

“Lord help us, Angharad, I love you. But I won’t be here forever.”

“You en’t going half-life?” Angharad treated the question with all the care it deserved, little girl’s hands coming to rest by her sides. Her eyes glittered like strange gems in the filtered sun of their lean-to, and her mother only smiled. “You _can’t_ ,” Angharad hissed, her fury bubbling up and popping brightly on her tongue. Adara was suddenly a bright-faced parrot, feathers bristling and beak snapping at the tortoise by her mother’s side. 

“We don’t get to say things like _can’t_ anymore, my darling,” her mother sighed, and reached out to pull her close. Angharad accepted the embrace, but stiffly, and her daemon only hissed when the old tortoise reached out with his head. “You know I love you, that’s what I can say.” 

“It’s not _right_ ,” Angharad said, but her vehemence was reduced to a whisper. Even she couldn’t fight the invisible sickness that cut through the Wretched as quick and efficient as a maggot farmer slicing up joints for his flies. Her mother was already missing a whole of one arm and part of her leg, sacrificed in the hope that the lumps wouldn’t spread. Traded for the shelter they now sat under and a few days worth of food.

“It’s what _is_.” 

“You’re the one who tells us that the world wasn’t always this way,” Adara said, changing to the shape of a badger and standing on her back legs to look her mother in the eye. “Who says that people used to live for thousands and thousands of days more.”

“I’m sorry, love, but that’s not true anymore.”

Angharad and Adara looked darkly at each other and did not ask the question that always followed. _Why, mother?_ They asked silently, knowing only that the answer was not safe. That it lay above them, in the cancerous rocks of the Citadel itself and the green that was always just beyond their reach. _Why do we live and die at His command?_


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In my timeline, between the time Furiosa was thrown from the Vault and the time she becomes a War Boy, she spends a few months among the Wretched. This time intersects when Angharad would have been growing up, before she's taken as a Wife. Almost cyclical, isn't it?

And then she was alone, or. As alone as a person could ever be, who had their soul walking by their side. Angharad was scrawny, flat-chested, and her hair hung in matted clumps because what could she possibly wash it with? She thought that she didn’t need her mother’s tricks to hide her, not when the mere fact of her existence made her so… so Wretched. 

But her bones were strong, and her skin was tough, and Adara shone with all the vitality of a full-life. She settled into the shape of a lioness, as tall as Angharad’s five-thousand-day-old midriff and golden as her human’s lengthening hair, and together they could take on any Wretched who thought to steal their shelter or their food or their precious, tainted water. 

Angharad walked with the skinned tent on her back and her feet in the dust, sat and panted in the dull shadow of her terrible home and watched for trouble with eyes as blue as the sky. As blue as good steel, untouched by the rust of her surroundings. 

There was plenty of trouble to be gotten into. She didn’t do it for fun, like her mother had accused her, or for stealing, which was why most of the fights among the Wretched happened. They were too tired to fight over much else. But she fought when it was right, when she could make _something_ right in this world full of wrong things. Dead things. She fought for life, crunched her fist through the fallout-eaten bones of those who would dig this hellhole deeper. 

She and Adara were practically inside the Citadel walls, waiting for the supply run, because the Tooth Man had told them that it was happening and the Immortan always brought them Aqua-Cola when a supply run was headed out. Those who didn’t have informants like the Tooth Man (who had taken three of Angharad’s maggots in return for the tip off) would be left at the edges of the crowd when the water rained down, and they wouldn’t get any of it. Of course, Angharad was not the only one he’d traded the information to, and she was wary of the shoving, more violent Wretched who thought they could turn themselves into War Boys, if only they could get close enough. 

“Hey! Watch yourself, bitch.” Their attention flickered towards the noise, ready to flick away again, but both of them were caught by the embryonic fight brewing less than twenty feet away. One of them was tall, for a Wretched, with hair cut as short as you could get it with the crude tools available and one arm that ended just below the elbow. The other was one of those Wretched who looked too well fed to be quite human anymore, whose little deer daemon had teeth that stuck out from her upper jaw and who snorted in confusion when she went to fight. Because the one-armed fighter had no daemon.

And both of them were old, adults, too old and tall and strong for Angharad to fight. But she went anyway, drawn by violence, Adara padding along like golden lightning by her side. 

The amputation was new; the bandages were still crusted with blood that was more red than brown, and her shirt fabric had white left in it. Angharad found herself scowling more at the man-eater and his sika deer. 

“I’ll suck your bones clean, breeder,” he snarled as the pair of them circled, and Angharad looked at her daemon. The lioness curled her lip, nodded. They hated man-eaters, many of whom didn’t care whether their prey was living or not when they started carving. 

While she and Adara had hesitated, the amputee had rushed her attacker, a snarl on her face fit to mimic the lioness. And she was full-life, no doubt about that. Angharad could hear it in the solid _thud_ the man-eater’s fists left in her flesh. She could see it in the wholeness of the stranger’s skin, though that was burned and flaking in the way some of the Wretched did. There was wholeness in her, despite the missing arm, that screamed that this was not one of the Wretched. Not really. Not the way the man-eater was, with the tumors that sprouted along a vein in his upper arm, or the ugly scars where some of them had been removed. 

The deer daemon pawed nervously, snorting and letting out honking sounds of anger. But she wasn’t ready to charge a human herself, and there was no daemon for her to fight. It wasn’t an unheard of thing to happen; Angharad had known two Wretched boys who had their daemons stolen by the shadows that lived in the towers of the Citadel. Old ones like the Tooth Man said that the shadows were the ghosts of cut daemons, the ones the War Boys discarded, all twisted up into hunger and cruelty. 

Angharad didn’t know about that. It seemed to her that there was plenty of anger and cruelty to be had without getting twisted up into it. But she couldn’t deny that there were shadows that looked nothing like living creatures, and that the shadows ate any daemons they could get their claws on. Sometimes the eating killed the human too. Mostly it just made them dead on the inside, and being dead on the outside followed so quickly that it made no difference. 

It was strange that this woman had no daemon, and no arm, and still had the strength to fight so strongly. Angharad decided that she liked her, knowing it was dangerous and not caring. She didn’t care about much that was dangerous. 

And for a moment, she thought that this fight would be over before she had to take a side. The man-eater had more strength to spare, had the advantage in size and reach on the one-armed and wasting woman, but he was not fighting to die. She was. Angharad crouched to watch, pulled the straps of her shelter from her back, Adara settling down into a hunting crouch by her side. The fight was fast, as it always was, dust kicked up by furious feet and both of them were too cunning to fall for the old sand-to-the-face trick. The woman was off balance, not knowing how to compensate for her lost arm, but she threw the man-eater over her shoulder like he was nothing when he tried to grab her. 

It went on too long. Angharad saw the moment when the woman was too tired to finish it; she simply didn’t have the endurance of someone who had been eating solid meals for weeks, more solid than most Wretched would let themselves sink into. After that, it was fractions of a second before he had her with one thick hand wrapped around her throat, and he tossed her to the ground and she could not get back up again.

He would have torn her up there, probably, gotten blood on the sand and the deer daemon was shrilling and drooling and Angharad swallowed to rid herself of the foul taste in the back of her throat. 

That was not all she did. With a roar Adara launched herself across the space that had been cleared for the fighters, batting at the fanged deer with a huge paws and claws extended. Angharad threw herself forward too, without thinking, without having to think. She was so much smaller than the man-eater, and if he hadn’t already been bleeding and bruised and heaving for air she would never have managed to _fight_ , but he was and she fought. 

She jammed her feet and fists and elbows into his knees and stomach and groin, had him staggering backward from the sheer surprise of the attack, and it was like climbing one of the Towers but Angharad clawed her way up his back and wrapped her arms around his throat in a choke-hold she’d learned from Roller, who had a heavy-shouldered jackdaw for a daemon and had traded her fights for the past fifty days whenever she wanted. 

He clawed at her, but his fingernails were already broken and torn from his fight with the amputee, and he was already out of breath and he couldn’t worm his thick fingers between her skin and his neck. The sika deer heaved and bucked, but in that match their sizes were reversed, and Adara easily bore the little deer to the ground, teeth tight against her neck. 

In a last ditch effort to get her off, the man-eater fell back against the ground. Hard. Suddenly he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t breathe, and Angharad’s grip was jarred. She hurried to tighten her grip, even though her ribs were crushed and at least one of them was broken, and he could almost get his chin under her arm. They both knew that if he got up, she would die. No matter if Adara held his daemon in her teeth and crushed her skull. Angharad would still be dead. 

She didn’t even see the woman until the fighter stepped up and kicked the man-eater’s head in. Angharad felt him go slack on top of her, and it made it just a fraction easier to breathe. She stared up at the one-armed woman who hadn’t stayed down, even when she had no daemon and her shortened arm was bleeding again, enough to stain the bandages fresh. Adara dropped the deer daemon with a thump, and Angharad scrambled to shove the man-eater’s dead weight off her. Even if the kick hadn’t killed him (and it hadn’t, his daemon was still here) he would be dead before he woke again. If his fellows didn’t get to him, he’d be trampled in the crowds that were already starting to surge restlessly against the sound of the lifts lowering to gather the supply run convoy. 

There was a hand in front of her face. Angharad looked at it blankly for a moment, then at the woman offering it. She was about to fall over herself, swaying on her feet and with bruises blooming like purple flowers on her face. But Angharad accepted her hand, and was jerked to her feet. The smaller girl fell against her daemon’s side, because Adara was there and tall and strong as always, and her broken rib felt like fire in her side. 

“What’s your name?” The stranger’s voice was sweeter than Angharad expected, a little hoarse but still clear. Not cracked and worn like any Wretched woman her age would have had. 

“Angharad,” the girl said, and because she had decided to like this woman she asked, “And yours?”

She hesitated, the fighter woman, she looked down and held onto her shortened arm and breathed quietly. Just when Angharad was ready to nod, to accept that there wasn’t a name there, or at least none that the woman wanted to give, she cleared her throat. “It’s–I’m. Furiosa.”

“Furiosa,” Angharad let the name bubble across her tongue, tasting the sharp edges of it and finding them as whole and full-life as the woman herself. She glanced up with eyes like dark steel and wondered if it was a mistake to trust someone as dangerous and keen as Furiosa was. 


	3. Chapter 3

Angharad picked up her shelter, because it’s abandonment had not been noticed. The Wretched were too close to Aqua-Cola, already lost in a thirsty haze that would turn them from people into beasts if they weren’t careful. So few of them were. Angharad wrapped her shelter back around her shoulders, and though Furiosa hadn’t moved, she went to stand by the fighter-woman again, and put a hand on her arm to steady her when Furiosa almost fell over. 

In the desperate press of Wretched that surged up after the Immortan’s speech, when Aqua-Cola was rolling down their backs and heads and falling into pots and pans and shirts and whatever they could possibly force to hold it, no one noticed if a daemon brushed against a leg, or if someone slipped and fell and found their hand on forbidden skin or scales or fur. 

Angharad had a hard time of it, because Adara was so big and their range so short. But she was full-life, and even at five thousand days (five thousand and six, but that was only a rough count because she’d lost track sometime three hundred days ago when a sickness came through the camp and she’d been coughing and dizzy for a while) she was strong enough to push her way to a spot near the front, strong enough to hold the old hubcap that usually served as her as a sun-shade up above her head and catch the water that fell like a tangible miracle from the Tower above.

Sometimes the press and shove of people turned from bestial to rapturous, and that made Angharad shudder, made her fall to her knees (like everyone else did) but she was retching because worship wasn’t supposed to feel like this. Like poison. 

She might fall, but she didn’t drop her water. And when it was shut off too soon, like it always was, and the fighting broke out again, she could huddle in the rocks at the base of the tower and Adara would stand at the crevice and beat back anyone who came near. This time was different, because Furiosa was there.

As far as Angharad could see, the only container the fighter-woman had was a dented tin cup, which was far too small for anything and only cemented the idea that she hadn’t been Wretched for long. But it was only now, with the fighter standing against the rock by Adara’s side, her little cup held in her hand and sheltered by her shortened arm, that Angharad wondered where she could have come from.

From the Citadel breeders? She was no Milking Mother, not with breasts like that, almost as flat and empty as Angharad’s. That _was_ what the man-eater had called her. But that was what men called all women, Wretched or not. Was she a War Boy, tossed out of a position so lusted after by every Wretched who had a chance to fight long enough to be of use? Her fighting might suggest so, but Angharad isn’t sure if a War Boy, raised in Joe’s grasp, would fight with such desperation. Like the world was ending every time she threw a punch. And the fighter-woman certainly didn’t fight for Valhalla, not for glory or any of the things she heard the Immortan promise to his War Boys. Had she come from one of the nomads that passed through the Citadel, trading with Wretched and War Boys alike? That seemed most likely, though it wouldn’t explain the loss of her daemon or her arm. 

Angharad was small, and she managed to wait out the worst of the mobbing with her entire hubcap full of water. She kept scooping it out to taste, though it mostly tasted of dirt in her hands. It was so clean, though. Furiosa and Adara stood guard over her, and Angharad wondered where the woman had come from, to be so protective. Everyone she had ever known, even the ones she might call friend, would have stolen her water in a heartbeat. Furiosa was bigger than her, stronger obviously, and had only that little cup to drink from. 

Even saving her in that fight wasn’t worth the favor of this much Aqua-Cola. Angharad knew it, and after the dark had come to make everything dangerous and clear out the rest of the lingering Wretched, she crept from her shelter and stared at the one-armed Furiosa. “What do you want from me?” she asked, terrified but wanting to know _now_ , before it was too late and she was dead. 

The moon had not come up yet, and in the shadows of the Citadel Furiosa looked like something not quite human, tall and quiet and pale. The night wiped away her bruises and her peeling skin, left only the violent bones behind. Adara snarled out their fear, but Furiosa barely even glanced at the huge lioness. 

“I don’t know,” the woman said at last, taking a swallow of Aqua-Cola from her cup. Angharad saw something twist across her face, some emotion the Wretched girl could not name. “No, I know. But I won’t take it from you.” And it wasn’t pity exactly, because there was no room for that in this world, but Furiosa’s words had something soft in them. Something like the remembered taste of a single green leaf in her mouth, from when Angharad’s mother had traded a bit of her leg for greens stolen from the untended ledges that the War Boys couldn’t get to. 

Angharad looked at Adara, who only shook her head, and back to Furiosa. “I don’t understand.” 

“I’m not taking anything from you,” the fighter-woman repeated, almost patient. “Except. If you want it. I’ll stand by you, split trades. If you want it.”

Angharad wasn’t certain that this was how the world worked, but this was what she knew: Furiosa had not taken her water, when Angharad was smaller and could not have stopped her. Well, she could have spilled it out onto the thirsty dirt, but that was not the same as keeping it. Furiosa was a vicious fighter, who threw punches like her life hung across her knuckles in a beaded strand. Furiosa was not one of the Wretched, and was full-life (though Angharad knew how quickly that could change). She would be a good ally, and a terrible enemy. Angharad looked again at her daemon, and the lioness came to stand pressed up against her side, tail twitching. 

“I say yes,” Adara whispered, though they both knew Furiosa could hear her. “Two sets of eyes are better than one.”

“And three fists,” Furiosa said, her voice drier than the Wasteland sand.

Angharad bit her lip and nodded. It was her turn to hold out a hand, juggling her hubcap so that not so much as a drop would spill. “I think I’d like that,” she said, and was not afraid to be seen.


	4. Chapter 4

Twelve days after their pact had been made, Angharad thought they had begun to find some sort of balance between them. Angharad had been looking out for herself for over six hundred days, and Furiosa must have been on the run even longer. Despite their handshake, it did not prove easy for them to work out what the promise meant. 

Furiosa was protective, but had no idea what it meant to trade with the Wretched. When no one could exist by more than the edge of their wits, trade became hard and everything was precious, from your waste to your own flesh. There were plenty of Wretched who traded in that, selling fingers for a taste of Aqua-Cola, feet for a bag of meal-worms, hands for maggots. It didn’t necessarily have to be your _own_ hands and feet either. 

So Angharad understood what it was to be Wretched, but she didn’t have the size or the years to negotiate a good trade. For the first few days, neither of them knew how to work with the other, and they went hungry. But if nothing else, the Wasteland encouraged quick learning.

And today they sat like two bones slotted together, Furiosa in the back of the one-person shelter and Angharad between her legs, trying to stay in the shade as much as possible. They were facing the Citadel, but they were at least two hour’s walk away. It was a pitiful distance by car, but only the strongest Wretched made it out this far. It was considered the safest camp, out of reach of the shadows that hunted the Citadel’s lower reaches and the casual violence of careless War Boys, yet still within easy walking distance should a supply run be announced or even hinted at. 

They had the last of Angharad’s water to drink, and a bag of insects big enough for two people hidden in the sand behind Furiosa’s back. Adara lay out in the baking sunshine, her fur shining like liquid gold, untouched by the heat. Or at least, she passed no feelings of discomfort on to Angharad, and she wouldn’t fit in the shelter anyway, even when Angharad was the only one using it. 

The girl picked at the crusted bandages on Furiosa’s arm, bored with waiting for the sun to go down so they could move. Most of her life as a Wretched involved constant, desperate movement, but that only made these dead times harder to bear. “You should open this,” she said, voice made lazy by the heat. “You should let a wound breathe, or it’ll rot. My mama told me.” 

Furiosa shifted, drew her arm away. Angharad let the rejection go in peace, and went back to watching the sand drift across the dunes. She was almost surprised when she felt Furiosa clear her throat behind her, felt her chest vibrate with words seldom used or needed. “My mum taught me that too,” she said, and it was like she was barely breathing. Like it hurt too much to breathe. 

Angharad only nodded, and when Furiosa held up her arm, she started picking at the knots with clever, unbroken fingers. “She’s dead. My mama,” the girl said, trying to draw out the enigmatic fighter. 

“Mine too,” Furiosa agreed, her voice hoarse with more than dust. Angharad started the unwrapping, piling the dirty cloth carefully next to her. It was all they had to re-wrap the arm with, and she thought she might be able to use some of her water to soften it a little. Underneath the cloth, dirtied with blood and dust and other, unknowable things, Furiosa’s skin was smooth and whole and almost clean. Angharad could not resist running her cracked fingertips across it, smearing dirt from her own skin onto the fighter’s, feeling the softness of skin protected from the ravages of the Waste, if only for a little while. Behind her, Furiosa breathed, and the sun pressed down on them like a smothering weight, and Angharad risked another question.

“What happened to your daemon?” she asked, pressing her fingers more sharply into the fabric as she reached the edge of where the blood had caked more thickly. 

She did not know if Furiosa would answer. It was an intensely personal question, and put Angharad one step closer to figuring out where Furiosa had come from. In the short time she had known the fighter-woman, Angharad had seen nothing to indicate that Furiosa _would_ answer, but then. It was a distraction from the pain that started as Angharad peeled blood away from torn and suffocated skin. The smell of smothered flesh made her twitch her nose, but it was far from the worst thing she’d ever smelled out here, and she sat silent. Waiting. 

“He’s alive,” Furiosa spoke like the words were being ripped from her chest, like she wanted more than anything to say them and it was costing her everything she had. “He’s still alive. My mother, my. My people, they.” She stopped talking when her voice broke, leaned her bristling forehead on the back of Angharad’s shoulder and fought desperately to stop herself from crying. Crying was a deadly waste of water. 

Angharad said nothing, only peeled carefully at the bandage and held Furiosa’s arm careful as glass full of Aqua-Cola. Adara looked up from her place in the sand, but Angharad glanced at her, a wordless warning not to move, and the lioness turned her attention to the dunes around them, keeping watch. 

“When you get to be old enough, my people take a…a quest, I think.” Furiosa spoke from her hunched place against Angharad’s shoulder, her voice still wavering but no longer cutting itself into pieces. “I don’t really know for sure, because. I wasn’t with them for the Test. But my daemon and I took it anyway, here, when we were alone. It lets you and your daemon get as far away from each other as you want; your range becomes the whole world.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Angharad said without thinking, and Furiosa let out a sharp breath that might have been meant as a laugh. 

“It doesn’t hurt after a while, but for the first few days I couldn’t move from the spot where he left me. Somehow, I thought he could come back. But I know he’s alright, even if I haven’t seen him in two hundred days. I can still feel him.”

Furiosa seemed to take strength from that acknowledgement; she sat up straight again, and Angharad pulled the last of the bandage from her severed arm and hissed in sympathy.

The cut, if it had even been a cut, was jagged and messy. There was a large bit of skin and muscle that hadn’t been chopped to the same length as the bone, and Furiosa had stemmed some of the bleeding by wrapping that leftover piece around the rest of the wound. The stench of undried, clotted blood was thicker now, but Angharad saw and smelled no rot in the wound. The skin was raw and red, but the air would dry the blood into proper scabs. While the scars would never be small, it didn’t look like Furiosa would die (from this wound at least). 

“That’s the luckiest cut I’ve ever seen,” Angharad said flatly. “What did you _do_ to get it so messed up? Chop it off yourself?”

Furiosa didn’t laugh, but turned her arm one way and then the other, inspecting the different angles. “No,” she said shortly, and Angharad sensed that the question-answering mood had gone. Nodding, she dug her covered hubcap up out of the sand where it was hidden and pulled the tight rubber lid off, stopping to drink a little and then scooting forward so she could turn and offer it to Furiosa. Only after the fighter-woman had had her drink did the girl dip the old bandage into the dregs of the water, by now full of sediment and there was barely a swallow left anyway. 

She ignored Furiosa’s wordless protest, mashing the bloody cloth around in an attempt to break off as much discharge as possible, and only after she was satisfied did she wring out the (still dirty) cloth and drape it loosely around Furiosa’s whole arm to dry. The fighter-woman looked at her silently, and for the first time Angharad noticed that the her eyes were green. _Green_ , like the tops of the Towers, like living things, like she really wasn’t human at all. Angharad wondered if she tasted alive too, that if she leaned forward and touched her lips to Furiosa’s she would taste that one green leaf she’d eaten as an unsettled child. If there would be echoes of water and softness on her tongue. 

“Thank you,” Furiosa said, and the words were heavy enough to break the skin of Angharad’s thoughts. She shook her head, both to the gratitude and her own fantasy, and reburied the hubcap. They couldn’t drink the water anymore, but there was no sense wasting it. She settled herself back in between Furiosa’s legs, pretending not to notice that she could _feel_ the fighter’s breath against her back and neck. That she had to bite the inside of her lip to stop herself from shivering. 

Adara let out a huffing sigh from outside the tent, and Angharad glared at her. The lioness only raised an eyebrow and put her head back down on the sand, making a show of stretching herself out to full length across the dune. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is turning out to be a LOT longer than I expected. Um. That's good, I think? 
> 
> Ok you have to tell me really, really honestly. Does the slash come out of no where? Because it's there in my head but I'm afraid it seems arbitrary to readers.


	5. Chapter 5

When she is five thousand and eight hundred days old, Angharad is swallowed by the Citadel. Or, she is seen for what she looks like by the wrong people. Or, she is too angry at the things she is not allowed to be angry at, and she is punished for it. In the end, the _why_ does not matter (it is the only thing that matters). It does not change the _what_. 

_What_ happens is this: Angharad and Furiosa are within the Citadel walls again. They are not alone (never alone) but they have taken places by the edge of the causeway, the clear dirt wide enough for a War Rig that is so forbidden that any Wretched who set a single foot there would be shredded without a second thought. 

As always, Furiosa is tenser inside the shadows of the Towers, but she is taller as well. She stares up at the sky more often, looking for a speck of flight with a name, who has freedom on his wings. Angharad does not know his name, but she knows that he’s alive. When Furiosa stands tall, it is hard not to follow her example. There is something about the fighter-woman, even in her silence, that encourages the part of Angharad made from fists and righteous anger and burning questions with no answers. 

It had been so long since her mother’s warnings last rang in her ears that she does not even pause to think of them, not even when War Boys walk by with their slouching stride, more suited to climbing about on speeding cars than stepping solid on hard ground. Why would they look twice at her? She is Wretched, and after her time as Angharad’s companion, Furiosa is beginning to look more like one of them as well. 

But it is not only War Boys who walk past, with their muffled senses and daemon-less snarls. On his way back from the Water Tower, where Joe has not yet appeared at his ledge, a black-faced Imperator struts past, his red wolf daemon gliding at a trot by his side.

It is the daemon who spots them, who catches Angharad’s eye and suddenly she’s pinned under that glare. Suddenly she is as small as a mealworm, her mouth goes dry, and by her side Adara seems to shrink. She cannot shrink enough. The wolf stops walking, barks something at his human, and the Imperator pauses.

Furiosa reaches out to take wrap her single hand around Angharad’s arm, pulling her away from the edge of the causeway. Her eyes still caught by the wolf daemon, Angharad can’t tell what her friend’s expression is, but she knows it’s too late. The Imperator covers the distance between them in five long steps, grabs her by the knots in her hair and drags her into the middle of the ‘street.’

“What’s this thing you’ve found, Alexos?”

Or he tries. Furiosa pulls back, and Angharad is caught between them and Adara is roaring out loud and the War Boys are coming and the Wretched clear back away from them as fast as ants leaving a crushed mound. 

“ _Don’t,_ ” Furiosa says, though Angharad doesn’t know who she thinks she’s talking to. Imperators take what they want. Even knowing that, her fingers are prying at the iron pull on her hair. She finds the space between the tendons in his wrist and _digs_ , and he lets go with a growl. His wolf goes for Adara, and Adara is bigger but she’s not as fast and the wolf knows fighting better, _likes_ it more. The Imperator laughs, and she hates him.

For a moment Angharad stands free in the road, her heart racing like a rabbit’s and Furiosa standing next to her. For a moment, and then the world comes crashing down with skeleton faces and the taste of chalk in her mouth. The War Boys have her pinned in moments, and they don’t care about touching daemons, they pin Adara too. At that Angharad screams, throwing herself against white hands. There’s no strategy now, just desperation and the sickening wrench of hands that aren’t hers pressed into gold fur. 

It is a thousand, a million times worse than the mobs at the water fall. Stunned by the crushing of her soul into her chest, Angharad feels her feet fall out from under her, and her vision flickers into black. 


End file.
